NOT JUST WORDS...

NOT JUST WORDS...

Life has taken me by storm recently – a creative storm. Quite out of the blue, over the summer, I started eyeing bits of driftwood. I’ve always loved rocks and have a huge collection of amazing stones I’ve gathered throughout the years, but although I love seeing strange pieces of washed-up driftwood, they’d never caught my eye in the way they did this summer. So, I started collecting them, from whatever beach I was fortunate enough to visit, and pretty soon, I filled a whole box with dry wonky driftwood.

My next question was, ‘All right...now I have the wood. What am I going to do with it?’

That’s when I remembered a dream I had sometime in the early spring, where I was carving little figurines out of wood and adding small crystals to them. In that particular dream, I’d carved out a dainty woman in a white dress (no larger than my palm), with long flowing purple hair; she was holding a small lantern with a green crystal, possibly a green fluorite, but I couldn’t be sure. This dream made me look at my small collection of driftwood in a different light.

So, I started carving.

And strange things occurred.

For starters, I began feeling centred and connected to something I’d felt I’d lost touch with for years and years. With my Theatre Design background, I always made a lot of things with my hands (from model boxes, to scale figures and furniture), as well as painted a lot, but life led me down other paths (mainly the path of writing), and I think I’d really missed not keeping my fingers...busy, so to speak!

This was wonderful, but more was to come.

I was absolutely amazed by how much these mangled old bits of wood – pieces that the sea had chewed up, then discarded to some distant shore, left wet and lonely for the sun to bleach and dry out – had to say. They have a voice that’s louder than I’d ever imagined! And they speak volumes!

Almost immediate, I developed a pattern of choosing which wood wanted to be worked on: I pick a piece and feel nothing. Then, I hold another one, and another, until my fingers wrap round one and – BAM! – there’s this magnetic energy, electricity flowing between my hand and the wood...and I know, I can see what’s hidden inside that weather-beaten wooden outer shell.

That’s when I start to carve.

And don’t think that what my mind’s eye sees is exactly what comes out, because it isn’t. There have been a number of moments when I’ve carved something and thought, ‘Yes! This is perfect.’...then make one tiiiiiny gentle movement and a whole area falls off!!! (Yes! You’re right to imagine me screaming and pulling my hair out here!) But, again, right at that moment when I think I have to throw the piece away, the wood speaks to me again. It tells me to stop trying to control it, to respect that it wants to become what it wants to become, not what I want to turn it into. I’ve learnt to trust these little voices. So I step out of my own way and let the piece of wood express its own nature. This makes me feel at peace. And teaches me the most invaluable and truly hard lesson of letting go, too...

But I’ve gone on long enough...time to show you my creations so far and to say that, yes, I love and live in words...but, sometimes, there’s more to life than words.